Hand-woven and dyed fabrics, elaborate gold and beaded jewelry, women with hennaed hands and feet, and military men in suits fill the work of photographer Seydou Keïta (1921–2001), the subject of a new exhibition, “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,” at New York’s Brooklyn Museum.
For the show—the largest North American survey of Keïta’s imagery to date—guest curator Catherine E. McKinley has brought together nearly 300 photographs, some never before seen, as well as personal belongings of Keïta’s, including vintage cameras. Born in Bamako, Mali, during French colonial rule, Keïta developed his studio practice against a backdrop of political unrest. For a time, French law forbade photography by Africans, but Keïta persisted, gaining popularity as Bamako’s most sought-after photographer. For more than a quarter century, Keïta photographed Bamakois from all walks of life—government officials, intellectuals, artists, and everyday members of Mali’s rising middle class.
Vogue sat down with McKinley to discuss the timeliness of the show, what makes Keïta’s work so singular, and how design sits at the heart of his photographic oeuvre.
Vogue: Exhibitions like this are years in the making. How long have you been working on it and what were some of the pivotal moments that led to it?
Catherine E. McKinley: I worked on it for just under two years, but it’s life work. I’ve been studying African photography and textiles since college. I was first introduced to Keïta in 1991, with his show at the Museum for African Art. My fascination became an immediate love. Going to Bamako was when the real work started. I met with the Keïta family and that meeting was pivotal.
Why Keïta and why now?
This is the most extensive North American show he’s had. The fact that it hasn’t happened in the 30 or so years since he was “discovered” is remarkable. It’s a chance to offer new information, a new framework. This is an important year for him and for African photography. Important shows are opening. MoMA has a large retrospective in December. African photography’s going to be on the radar in a big way.
What was the process of acquiring loans from private collections and working with the family?
Jean Pigozzi is the copyright holder and has most of Keïta’s works. I made an effort to find work in individual collections and institutions like the Chicago Art Institute and the Musée National du Mali. I wanted to represent collections that were unknown, whether family collections or small family-run archives on the continent. To my delight, some of the best materials were in those collections. Textiles held in families were superior to what was held in Western institutions.
What does the inclusion of textiles, clothing, jewelry, accessories, and other objects have to say about Keïta as an artist?
I wanted to create intimacy with his work. Since 1991 I have been traveling regularly to Africa, and if I learned anything in that time, it’s about the value of community. That guides me. Would it have been easier to take 200 photos and set up a narrative of those photos? Yes, but I kept coming back to who was Keïta? We know things about him, but the only way to learn something new was to dig into more intimate corners. I couldn’t have done this show without talking to the family.
This show is at once a history lesson and a lesson in design and spatial aesthetics. How did Keïta blend these two things?
At some point I realized that maybe this should be an exhibition about design. We’ve almost overlooked him as a design force. He’s so much a part of pop culture. People don’t necessarily separate him from Malick Sidibé or other photographers, but his legacy is specific. Nobody else had that patterning. He did so much on a whim. He had an incredible eye and was so astute. There’s almost another book or exhibition waiting to be done that looks specifically to design history.
How do Seydou’s photographs expand our understanding of photography as an act of agency over oneself and one’s image?
Keïta broke all the rules. The French laws in 1935 forbade and censored photography by African photographers. That’s when Keïta is starting. He’s rupturing everything [one would expect] about photography at that time. He’s able to earn so much money and have an elite livelihood when most people could barely afford a photo. He was never schooled. It was a lesson in looking beyond the received narrative of things. And further, his work is so deeply political, and by his own admission he was not a political man.
In the exhibition we discover the politics of fashion. How does that relate to the criticality of Keïta’s work and his immense impact on contemporary photography?
If Keïta were working 10 years later, his images would not have been alive in the same way. He was of a moment where society was reconfiguring. Independence was on the horizon. It was a perfect stew that couldn’t be reproduced at any other moment. It shows up primarily in fashion. The materials people used, the ways in which things were fashioned, could only have happened then. It was a studio practice, using the singular raw material he had to work with.
I’m fascinated by the fact that Keïta’s work was included anonymously in his first Western exhibition, “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art” at the New Museum in 1991.
The first photos not being identified is so bizarre, exhibiting them as totally removed from authorship. It’s strange to me that nobody went back to pick up the pieces about that. It took many years before he was identified, I remember that show and those photos and exactly how they made me feel: euphoric. They were so beautiful. I think it’s an important lesson for us, within this political moment, to do the work with an extra layer of care.
What do you want people to take away and learn from this show?
I want people to learn to look. When you see the patterning and the complexity, it takes a long time to learn how to read that image and get inside the layers of it. I hope it teaches people to look with their own perspective, to slow down. I grew up in a household where we had Ebony, Jet, National Geographic. Images of Africa were either of poverty or some kind of romance with Africa. When I started to look at African photographers like Keïta, it was like learning a new way of looking. He had a way of reading right into the soul of a person, an ability to enter people’s consciousness or spirit.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. “Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 8, 2026.